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MLB Mailbag: Starting Pitcher Trade Candidates, Retirements, Giants, Rockies, Mets

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This week's mailbag gets into potential Giants trade targets, long shot front of the rotation trade candidates this summer, players who might retire after the season, and much more.

Todd asks:

Since the Giants have done so much better than expected, chances of them doing something significant before the trade deadline seem likely. Who do you expect the Giants to be pursuing, or at least who should they be pursuing?

The Giants sit at 15-9 with a 47% chance at the playoffs.  I agree they'll be looking to upgrade at the deadline.

Offensively, left field and first base seem like potential areas to improve.  Heliot Ramos, manning left field, hasn't hit much over his last 200 PA dating back to last year.  The Giants have some options in Triple-A, but none that seem clearly better than the likely 2-WAR-ish Ramos.  Looking through the various unlikely playoff teams' outfields, I could see Taylor Ward being a decent target.  Still, I'm not convinced he's better than Ramos.  We'll get to Luis Robert Jr. later in this mailbag.

Bryce Eldridge homered in his first at-bat of the year yesterday, and if he gets to Triple-A quickly and hits well, I could see a fast track to the Majors.  The bottom line is that I don't see an obvious position player for the Giants to target - yet.

As I said last week, the Giants will need more starting pitching behind Logan Webb.  Landen Roupp and Justin Verlander both pitched well against the Angels over the weekend.  Robbie Ray is entrenched salary-wise.  Jordan Hicks could wind up in the bullpen, though he would probably not prefer that.

Sandy Alcantara is the name on everyone's lips, and he's back throwing 98 and getting groundballs, though he hasn't actually pitched well through four starts.  Sonny Gray could be interesting, though there's no suggestion he'd waive his no-trade clause.  Which other pitchers might be available at the deadline?

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The Giants Should Consider A Rotation Change

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The Giants had a rotation battle throughout Spring Training. Logan Webb, Robbie Ray and Justin Verlander were locked into the top three spots. President of baseball operations Buster Posey said in December that the team remained committed to Jordan Hicks as a starter. The final job would go to one of three younger arms: Kyle Harrison, Hayden Birdsong or Landen Roupp.

Harrison seemed like the frontrunner entering camp. If that had been the case, he quickly pitched his way out of it. The lefty allowed eight runs in 6 2/3 spring innings. The Giants optioned him before Opening Day. (He's since made four starts at Triple-A Sacramento, allowing nine earned runs despite recording 21 strikeouts over 15 innings.) It came down to Birdsong and Roupp, with the latter getting the nod. Birdsong broke camp as a long reliever.

The decision came as a surprise. Birdsong started 16 all of his major league appearances last year. He turned in a 4.75 ERA over 72 innings as a rookie. He'd been lights out during Spring Training, firing 12 innings of one-run ball with 18 strikeouts and no walks. Roupp had a good but less impressive camp, giving up five runs with 14 strikeouts and one walk across 12 frames. He also had more experience working out of the bullpen, as he'd started just four of 23 appearances during his debut season last year.

San Francisco probably feels good about their decision to give Roupp a rotation job. The 26-year-old righty carries a 4.09 earned run average with an excellent 31.2% strikeout rate through the first four turns. He has recorded a pair of quality starts and reached seven innings for the first time in his MLB career on Saturday, when he held the Angels to two runs while striking out nine.

While Roupp has earned continued starting looks, the rest of the rotation beyond Webb has struggled. The Giants have raced to a 15-9 record despite their rotation having the seventh-worst ERA in MLB, entering play Wednesday. They should already consider making a change.

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Front Office Subscriber Chat Transcript

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MLBTR's Steve Adams hosted a live chat today at 2pm CT, exclusively for Trade Rumors Front Office subscribers.

 

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The Rays’ Emerging Core

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I was just 15-20 minutes into writing this when the Rays placed Richie Palacios back on the injured list and selected the contract of prospect Chandler Simpson, widely regarded as the fastest player in the sport. Simpson swiped 104 bags in 110 minor league games last year. He was caught only 13 times. He's 8-for-11 in steals to begin the current season. He's struck out in fewer than 10% of his professional plate appearances. Simpson has virtually no power, but he's an oddity in today's game and a throwback to the leadoff hitters of yesteryear. If he can carry those wheels and that preternatural contact ability over to the majors, he's going to garner a lot of national attention, simply because he's a departure from the MLB archetype in an era of baseball that's increasingly focused on power, elevating the ball, exit velocity, etc.

Maybe Simpson will be a star for the Rays. Maybe he'll follow the Billy Hamilton career path. We can't know yet. He hasn't played a single big league game. But even without the promotion of a notable prospect, the Rays' future was already starting to look quite bright.

We're early in the 2025 season, of course, so lots of things can be chalked up to small sample sizes. And the Rays do have plenty of early small-sample success stories. It hasn't yet translated into winning ball, evidenced by their 8-11 record, but Tampa Bay has a +11 run differential and has spent a good portion (in some cases all) of the season playing without some key stars. Shane McClanahan is wrapping up his rehab from Tommy John surgery. Josh Lowe has been out almost all year with a strained oblique. Ha-Seong Kim was signed knowing that he'd be out into at least May following shoulder surgery. The version of the Rays that president of baseball operations Erik Neander and manager Kevin Cash trot out in June and July should be expected to look quite a bit different than the April version.

There are still some intriguing names on the roster right now, however, many of whom are flying too far under the radar. It's easy to get too caught up in early-season data, as it tends to balance out over a larger sample. But with many of the Rays' young and/or returning contributors, the breakout campaigns they're teasing date back to the second half of the 2024 season. Tampa Bay operated as a seller last summer, trading away veterans Zach Eflin, Jason Adam, Isaac Paredes, Randy Arozarena, Aaron Civale and Phil Maton, among others.

That opened the door for a wave of younger players to begin receiving more playing time, and if you trace things back to that point, some of these eye-opening March/April stats start to look a little more legitimate. It's still only about 40% of a season -- less than that in some cases -- but as is always the case with a Rays team that ebbs and flows through periods of contending and rebuilding on the fly, there are some very intriguing components of a core taking shape.

Let's run through a few particular standouts.

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Front Office Subscriber Chat Transcript

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MLBTR’s Anthony Franco held a live chat today, exclusively for Front Office subscribers!

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MLB Mailbag: Arenado, Rangers, Red Sox, Angels, Giants

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Today's mailbag gets into Nolan Arenado's future with the Cardinals, offensive struggles for the Rangers and Red Sox, hot starts for the Angels and Giants, and much more.

Sam asks:

Arenado is off to a pretty good start with his surface level stats but his batted ball profile is still pretty bad. Barring an injury to a third baseman on a contender, is he going to be playing for the Cardinals for the next 3 years?

Arenado, 34 today, has an excellent 136 wRC+ through 74 plate appearances.  His Statcast numbers have always been middling since he was traded to St. Louis four years ago.  As you know, the Cardinals tried to move Arenado during the offseason, both to save money and open up playing time for younger players.  Arenado wasn't willing to say yes when asked to approve a trade to the Astros in December, and no deal materialized with the four other teams on the third baseman's list.

In February, Katie Woo of The Athletic reported that the Cardinals "had conversations with at least nine organizations" about Arenado during the offseason.  Woo said the other four teams on Arenado's list besides the Astros were the Dodgers, Red Sox, Padres, and Yankees.  The rigidity of Arenado's list is confusing.  He said, "I don’t see myself changing that list ever. I have a family now. … To be willing to pick up my family and move them, it has to be something that’s worth it."  Arenado is clearly not bound entirely by geography, having chosen teams on both the East and West coast.  But let's look at some playoff odds from when the season opened:

  • Astros: 53.5%
  • Dodgers: 97.6%
  • Red Sox: 56.2%
  • Padres: 35.1%
  • Yankees: 62.3%
  • Cardinals: 23.2%
  • Tigers: 46.6%
  • Royals: 41.8%
  • Angels: 10.5%

Is it fair to say that for Arenado to leave the comfort of St. Louis he needs what he considers a strong chance at winning the World Series, but he might accept a lesser chance for a team near where he grew up, such as the Padres?  What makes this tricky is that Arenado seems to have developed his own playoff odds.  Playoff odds are not reliable in the best case, and Arenado is probably worse at this than FanGraphs.

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Luis Robert’s Slow Start

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April tends to be relatively quiet on the transaction front. The early part of the month saw a handful of extensions as talks that had begun in Spring Training carried into the regular season. There probably won't be much more significant hot stove activity for the next couple months. That's largely because all but three teams -- the White Sox, Marlins and Rockies -- went into the season with some measure of hope about competing. The trio of clearly noncompetitive clubs had already moved most of their realistic trade candidates who'd bring back prospect talent.

Luis Robert Jr. is an exception. The White Sox held onto their former All-Star center fielder over the offseason. Robert was coming off the worst season of his career. He lost nearly two months early in the season with a hip flexor strain and was unproductive when healthy. He hit .224/.278/.379 with 14 homers in 100 games. Robert looked nothing like the player who'd finished 12th in AL MVP balloting one year earlier.

It made for a difficult evaluation. Robert has shown star upside -- not only in the aforementioned 2023 campaign but in an injury-shortened '21 season when he hit .338/.378/.567 over 68 games. Last year's White Sox were en route to the worst season in the modern era. Maybe Robert's .216/.253/.302 showing in the second half reflected some amount of mental fatigue. At 27 years old, he should remain in his prime.

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Front Office Subscriber Chat Transcript

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MLBTR's Steve Adams hosted a chat today at 2pm CT, exclusively for Trade Rumors Front Office subscribers.

 

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A Tough Call In Next Winter’s Rotation Class

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MLBTR will release our first Power Rankings of the upcoming free agent class in the next few days. Ordering starting pitchers is often the most challenging part of that process. Next winter's class has a few of those tricky calls -- perhaps none closer than Zac Gallen versus Michael King.

Gallen certainly has the longer track record as an above-average starting pitcher. The righty has started all 146 of his major league appearances. He has been consistently effective, working to a 4.30 ERA or better in all six years (not including this year's 5.28 mark over three starts). Gallen has only once allowed four earned runs per nine in a season. He has punched out at least a quarter of opposing hitters in each year. The result is a 3.33 earned run average with a near-27% strikeout rate in more than 800 career innings.

King has spent the majority of his big league career working out of the bullpen. The Yankees kept him in long relief for most of his first four seasons. It wasn't until the waning weeks of the 2023 season that they gave him a rotation spot, largely because of injuries elsewhere on the pitching staff. King shined in nine starts, was the centerpiece of San Diego's return for Juan Soto, and had a fantastic first full season as a starter.

Over 173 2/3 frames, he turned in a 2.95 ERA while striking out 27.7% of opposing hitters. He showed no signs of slowing down as he pushed well beyond his previous career-high workload. King managed a 2.15 ERA across 62 2/3 innings after the All-Star Break. He finished seventh in NL Cy Young balloting.

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Front Office Subscriber Chat Transcript

By | at

MLBTR's Steve Adams hosted a chat today at 2pm CT, exclusively for Trade Rumors Front Office subscribers.

 

Unlock Subscriber-Exclusive Articles Like This One With a Trade Rumors Front Office Subscription

BENEFITS
  • Access weekly subscriber-only articles by Tim Dierkes, Steve Adams, and Anthony Franco.
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